The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

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One of the appeals of the Watch is its big, bright, crisp AMOLED display. So it’s not surprising that many people who bought an Apple Watch took to online forums to complain about ghosting. I saw the exact same thing when I first fired up my Apple Watch; white smudges under an open screen that looked something like the light bleed effect you often see around the edges of backlit LED panels. It looked like a manufacturing defect and I was not happy, to say the least.

You can see the effect pretty clearly on my Apple Watch.

Ghosting is a common complaint among new Apple Watch owners (Credit: Brad Moon)

Fortunately, this isn’t a hardware problem, it’s all about Apple trying to make things look cool by using transparency effects. This might work well on a larger device like an iPhone, but on the relatively small display of the Apple Watch, it tends to just look smudgy —like a defect on the panel. It can be even worse than the example I’ve shown (in this one you can at least make out the watch face in the background), depending on what screen you’re currently on and which screen you were viewing previously.

Unfortunately, Apple ships the Apple Watch with the feature enabled by default and even if you recognize what’s going on, it’s not exactly intuitive to figure out how to turn it off. Here’s how.

To get rid of the ghosting effect, open the Watch app on your iPhone, navigate to Accessibility then turn on Reduce Transparency.